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181.FM - The FrontPorch Bluegrass Few people realise it, but this building and the ones around it have a direct connection to a mysterious past. There's a secret hidden in this iconic skyline. And deciphering it will reveal a longlost world. I'm going to reach back in time to explore this lost world. The evidence that unlocks that ancient past is hidden all around us in rocks, landscapes and even animals. The tiniest detail can reveal the history of a vast continent. Those clues reveal a defining moment in the story of the America and show how these turning points have transformed evolution... It's moving. ..created incredible economic riches... That feels really close. ..and changed the human history of these two great continents. If you really want to understand the modern America, you have to understand the remarkable story of how they were born, from the wreckage of a lost world. You can find a clue to the origin of both American continents here at the top of World Trade Center . It's the way that Manhattan skyscrapers are concentrated in just two places Downtown, where I am, and a couple of miles further north. And there you can see the Empire State Building that patch is Midtown. New York 181.FM - The FrontPorch Bluegrass are concentrated in Midtown and Downtown for a very good reason. One that's buried beneath each one of them and that puts New York at the heart of an ancient world. To find evidence for this ancient world, I need to explore the foundations of the city's skyscrapers. It's a bit rickety, this thing, isn't it? Before any building goes up high, you've got to dig down deep. And that takes some hardcore tools. Now, that is the kind of geology hammer I have always wanted to have. I'm looking for a particular type of rock. One that dates back at least million years. Inside it, there's evidence of what this place was like in the longdistant past. A past that helps explain the mystery of New York's skyline. Crystal. High pressures. This rock face, it's the foundation stone on which, for me, modern America was built. If you look at it, you can see there's a whole series of lines. It's like bands coming through. And that's because of the crystals look, you can see them glittering away here. They're all stacked on top of each other in a series of layers. You can see that when you look at it closely. When you zoom into this rock... what you see is a mosaic of crystals that are flattened in this direction and are elongated, strung out in this direction here. And that transformation, that rearrangement, has been done under really high temperatures, maybe degrees, but also really high pressures. You get an idea of just how much pressure from a mineral that you actually find in here. It's a mineral that gives this rock a blue tinge. And it's a mineral called kyanite. Now, kyanite is a really interesting mineral. 181.FM - The FrontPorch Bluegrass It's formed by pressures of four kilobars or more. Four kilobars doesn't seem very much, but if you were squeezed by four kilobars you'd be squeezed by a block of rock a metre by a metre that extends upward for kilometres. This dense bedrock is known as Manhattan schist.